He wants a life of his own, the ability to have a family and home that we take for granted. Aside from this skill, he's a very believable main character. Hiram's power to transport himself in space is a heaping dash of magic added to this realistic portrait of the South and becomes a way for him to transport himself and then others. It's a sick symbiosis that can't be maintained. Slaves are little better than functional furniture, but this also means that the Quality are effectively unable to care for themselves in any useful kind of way. The language really draws me in, adding to the color and rhythms of plantation life, and the subtle horrors of slavery are dealt with matter of factly: families are regularly broken up and sold off to enrich the Quality's coffers to make ends meet when tobacco crops don't yield as much as before, slaves are often beaten for no reason at all, people are treated in a dehumanized way simply because of the color of their skin, and in fact are not seen as people at all. This is a story of slavery, after all, even as the people of Virginia try to pretty up the terms: the Quality are the rich and propertied white folk, the Tasked are the slaves, and the Low are the poor whites that take out the frustrations of their social status on whatever slaves they can. September 2019 One World 978-0399590597Īudio, ebook, print (416 pages) magical realismįrom the opening page, this story is as lyrically beautiful as it is brutal. A free book was provided for an honest review. It's a difficult life, and Hiram wants to save those he cares about as well.Īmazon affiliate links are used on this site. A mysterious power seems to have rescued him from death, and he is eventually caught up in the Underground and helping to free others from slavery. He continues to live the life of the Tasked, until nearly drowning in a river. His mother was sold away and he continued to live on the property, his impressive memory being a trait that others want to maximize. Hiram Walker was born into slavery, even though his father was the Virginia plantation owner.

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